Mother's Younger Brother and His Disguises
Mother’s younger brother’s black face is not just a practical choice when joining Coalhouse's movement, but a metaphor for his fragmented sense of self. Throughout the entire book, he struggles with identity, borrowing literal and figurative masks instead of growing his own authentic and firmly established one. Younger Brother’s reliance on imitations, disguises, and other people’s causes exhibits the fragility of his principles. To see this most clearly, we can look at how he is characterized before he joins Coalhouse’s cause. Before Coalhouse’s organization, Younger Brother was portrayed as a restless and purposeless person. When Younger Brother had an encounter with Emma Goldman and Evelan Nesbit, he is infatuated and searching with Goldman’s fierce personality, but cannot create or act upon his own convictions (Doctorow, 62-64). After his heartbreak with Nesbit early in the novel, he finds a radical cause, Coalhouse’s, to latch onto (243). I believe his fascination with radica...